Accidental Happiness (6 page)

“No. It’s not that.” I felt the blood going through my temples; a kind of panic fluttered in my chest. But it had been a while since I’d had to say it, to actually tell someone who didn’t know.

“He had an accident,” I managed. “Three months ago.”

I watched her face change. The structure of her cheeks, her jaw, seemed to wither somehow as my meaning settled in.

“He’s gone, Reese. He died in a car accident.”

Her eyes, large and intent on me, registered the pain, and for just a second, a flash of something else. Panic? She bit her bottom lip, shook her head slightly as tears came into her eyes.

“We looked for you,” I said, my words gathering speed to keep my own emotions at arm’s length. “The lawyers and I contacted all the addresses we could find, but you’d moved on. We didn’t know how to find you, and . . .”

And what? There was nothing else to say, really. Her expression was terrible, the edges of her mouth pulled down, like the pure sadness of a child. She still cared, beyond what I’d imagined. I wondered why she’d ever left him. If she hadn’t, I don’t see how Benjamin would have ended up with me. I had the odd notion to thank her, but it didn’t seem like a sane thing to do.

“What happened?” Her voice had gone passive, almost trancelike. “What kind of accident?”

The words formed in my head, but they were hard, nearly impossible, to say. I suddenly wanted her to go away. I wanted to have a different story to tell. I was so tired of the one life had handed me. But the images wouldn’t leave me. The lumber, the truck, Benjamin’s car. I allowed the words to come, even though I knew tears would follow.

“A truck carrying logs was on an overpass when the binding that held a section of the timber snapped. The logs broke free,” I explained.

I didn’t tell her where I’d been, couldn’t reveal my part in it. Running out of gas, begging him to leave his meeting and bail me out.
Gina, just call AAA.
I’d told him AAA would take too long, I had an interview to get to.
Please, Ben. I know it’s a pain, but I’ll owe you one.
No one said I was to blame, but still, the thought rubbed in me, left me raw and blistered.

“Are you okay?” Reese was saying. I’d clearly lost myself again.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “It’s just hard to think about it without . . .” Muscles tightened in my throat, stopped any words that might have followed.

“So,” she said, her voice shaking. “Is there more?” I wasn’t sure what she meant.

As she spoke, she stared past me, as if a video of Benjamin’s demise played on the wall of the restaurant and I only added commentary. The waiter brought our tea, apologized for the small amount that sloshed onto the white tablecloth near my hand.

“A log,” I said after he walked away, “it came down end first into Benjamin’s windshield just as his car started underneath . . .” My words embellished what seemed obvious to me, but she listened anyway.

I could see the overpass, logs falling like pickup sticks. Benjamin would have heard it before it hit. They said it was too fast, gave me the sanitized, widow’s version of the report, but I didn’t believe them. Benjamin was bold but careful, and alive to everything around him. He would have seen them falling. This bothered me the most. That he might have had a moment of awareness, of terror. And as it happened, I was less than a mile away. Waiting. Irritated at his delay.

“It fell on Benjamin’s car. He was crushed, never aware of what happened. They said he most likely never felt anything.” The widow’s version for her too. Was an ex-wife still a widow?

The air-conditioned room pressed cold against my damp cheeks. I wanted my emotions in check. I didn’t even know this woman. But then, I looked at her. Tears fell free down her face. She’d had him longer than I did. A lot longer. Six years married, longer than that together. The thought of it brought anger, brief and irrational, to the surface of my thoughts.

“He’s really dead?” The high pitch, the garbled quality of her voice, sounded familiar. It sounded like mine.

I saw myself dialing his cell phone, irritated that he was taking so long. I heard it ringing and ringing in the car beside his lifeless body, until his voice mail said, “Hello, this is Benjamin . . .”

“It happened fast,” I said again, words thick in my throat. “He probably didn’t feel anything.” Those were the only words that had comforted me. I offered them to her with vague hope, surprised that I wanted to spare her pain. Then I moved through the explanation, parroting the words of the policeman who found me the day Benjamin died. “The one log landed directly on the car, crushed it in an instant.” A soft-top convertible. They said it would have been the same, regardless of the top, that the logs would have crushed anything but an army tank. “It was a really freak accident.” My face was wet, my voice weak. I felt exhausted.

“Were you with him?” A wounded quality existed inside of her question. The answer implied a lonely death for Benjamin. Ben didn’t like to be alone.

“I was down the street,” I told her. “In my car. I wasn’t there.”

She nodded, looked out toward the window, as if taking her eyes from me could negate what I’d said. I took in long pulls of air, pushed the images out of my mind. Away from the car. Away from the crushing sound. I’d trained myself to do this. Very Zen, my strange friend Avis told me once.
Just breathe.
I had natural Zen instincts, she told me. This from a woman named after a rental car.

As I was forcing calm into my muscles, into my thoughts, Reese took me by surprise, switched sides, and came over to the chair closest to mine. She leaned in toward me. Her presence warm, she smelled like Coppertone.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as if she had secured the faulty log bindings herself. “He was too fine a person to die. It should have been anybody but him. He was . . .” She couldn’t seem to finish. “It should have been someone less . . . I don’t know.” She finally let it go at that.

Even as her tears went unchecked, she reached up, brushed my face with her fingers, smoothed my tears with her open hand. It was an odd, inappropriate gesture from someone who was, essentially, a stranger to me. Worse than a stranger, a rival, of sorts. But something made it all right.

“I’m sorry about some of the things I said last night,” she said. “Angel and I just needed to stay someplace until I could talk to Ben. I never thought you’d be there. What happened, it was an accident. Bad luck for everybody. Just like what happened to Benjamin.”

When she said his name, the quality of her voice changed. She
had
loved him, on some level she still did. We had that much in common. The last person to offer the same connection had been his mother. But ultimately, her extended visit after the funeral had been too hard on both of us.

“This is so awful,” Reese mumbled, pulling wet strands of hair from her cheek.

The waiter stood by the table holding our soup. He seemed confused, in a quandary over where to put the bowls.

“I’m over here,” Reese said, standing up, going back to her seat.

“Is everything okay?” he asked. He was thin, almost handsome, but not quite. His face offered genuine concern.

“We’re fine,” I told him. As Reese reached across the table to lay a hand on mine, I reminded myself that she was Benjamin’s ex-wife. That finding comfort in her lingering love for my husband was nuts. The waiter glanced down at our connected hands, offered a slight smile as if he finally understood our display. I wanted to laugh, but the effort seemed too great.

“This really blows.” Reese’s rough tone, the exclamation itself, took me off guard. It sounded cathartic, and I laughed, without warning. The sound of my own laughter embarrassed me.

She looked at me, straight at my eyes. So few people made eye contact with me when I told them about Benjamin. But she did. The acknowledgment made me bold.

“You’re right. It sucks,” I said, giving up on propriety. Giving in, somehow. “All of it. It’s goddamn awful.” Through the distorted vision of tears, I saw the edges of a smile at her mouth too, though her eyes spoke only of grief. It seemed a profound kindness, somehow—that effort on her part, as if she might show me the way back, away from the edge.

“Fucking logs,” she said, voice breaking in pain. The extreme inflection landed like a punch line. She squeezed my hand and I gave in to the terrible humor, rich and relentless. One thing I’d learned in my short stint of widowhood—comfort was a quirky animal, offered freely, but rarely felt on the receiving end. Anything that helped was a blessing.

“I was so worried about Angel,” she said, “and then so relieved. It never occurred to me that anything could have happened to Ben.”

There was nothing else for me to say. Glassware clinked as the table next to ours was cleared. The summer hires yelled back and forth to each other, moving in and out of the kitchen, and a car horn honked on the street outside. The sounds came to me, familiar but misplaced. We found ourselves again in the normal world, straightened up, and moved toward calm again. The people at the next table, two men on a business lunch, I guessed, regarded us without looking directly.

“Oh, Jesus, just look at us,” Reese said. A final coda on our outburst.

I wiped my cheek with an open hand, smeared the damp tears across my face. I felt spent, but relieved just the same. Something had changed, but I couldn’t say what. I wiped my eyes with my napkin, then put it on my lap and took note of my bisque.

“I’m not hungry,” she said, but lifted the spoon to her lips all the same.

I nodded. There were dozens of questions to ask her. One in particular. But I had played all of my emotions for the time being, needed to regroup, to prepare for the answers she would give. Later, at some point, I realized the waiter had brought our meals. I couldn’t say when. Reese and I, we made slight efforts at our entrées, but finally gave up, sipped our tea instead.

“Benjamin was happy with you,” she said, unprompted, breaking a long silence. “I could hear it every time I talked with him. He always talked about you.”

“Thank you,” I managed, feeling the thinness of the response weighed against her odd compliment.

She leaned back, lit a cigarette. I waited for them to come and tell her to put it out, but no one bothered. We’d outlasted the lunch crowd. I pushed my plate away, finished without really tasting anything at all. As I waited for the waiter to bring me the check, I realized that contrary to all expectations, the strangeness of the day had fallen away. For the second time in a single afternoon, I seemed to catch a passing glance at the person I used to be. Even more, maybe it was the person I wanted to be.

5

Reese

“I
’ll be back to pick you two up around four,” Gina said as Reese got out of her car. “Isn’t that what they told you?”

“Four or four-thirty,” Reese said. “I’m surprised they’re letting her leave so soon, but I guess they know what they’re doing. Why don’t you make it five? That will give me time to talk with the doctor again.”

Reese wanted to go through everything with them one more time, how to change her daughter’s bandages, how much painkiller to give her. For the first time since she’d found out Angel was okay, she was frightened. What if she screwed up? But she wouldn’t show fear. Angel had to be confident that everything was okay. Besides, Reese knew she had gotten very good at masking her bad feelings, both physical and emotional.

“Five,” Gina said, her elbow leaning out of the car window. “I’ll be here.”

“Thanks, Gina, and . . . I don’t know what to say about Benjamin. I’m really sorry you’ve been through all this.” Reese struggled with the condolence. There were no Hallmark greetings for an ex-wife expressing sympathies to the widow. Maybe there should be. More and more, everyone was somebody’s ex-wife, ex-husband.

“There’s not much to say,” Gina offered. “Do you need for me to pick up anything for you? Toothpaste? Shampoo?”

Reese felt relieved. This woman didn’t want to delve any deeper into emotions than they had already gone. Their moment of bonding had passed and Reese still felt overexposed.

“No, thanks. We’re good.”

Gina had offered to let her and Angel stay on the boat. It didn’t seem like the best idea in the world, but there weren’t a lot of options out there. She had sixty-seven dollars in her wallet and a gift certificate for a meal at Shoney’s.

Reese stood outside the door to the hospital, watched as Gina drove out of the parking lot, heading back toward the marina. Then she pulled out her second cigarette in less than two hours from the pack Gina’s neighbor had brought to the hospital. She allowed herself no more than five a day—a decision borne of economics rather than concern for her health. If finances didn’t improve soon, she’d have to consider quitting, but the way she saw it, with all the problems she faced, she and Angel might both be better off if she kicked off in her fifties from lung cancer.

Still, she never smoked around Angel. Not to hide anything. Reese took care to always stay honest with her daughter. She just didn’t want the child breathing in smoke, plain and simple.

“Terrible the way they treat us, huh?” A skinny, middle-age man in his pajamas stood on the other side of the concrete cylinder that served as an ashtray. “Sending us outside in the heat like we got something catching.”

Reese regarded the man. The hard set of his mouth suggested a life of disappointment, or perhaps simply discontent.

“My daughter’s a patient in there,” she said, keeping her distance. “I don’t want her around this kind of air, so I really don’t mind being outside.”

The man shrugged, made a short, snorting sound, and walked to the other side of the entryway. Reese turned away from him, let her thoughts go again to Benjamin—and to Angel. Telling Angel would be hard. She had laid her plans carefully when she first told Ben about Angel. She’d screwed everything up when she panicked that last time they saw him. But this . . . She couldn’t have done anything to change what happened to Benjamin.

“Could I bum one of those?” An old woman, ancient really, stood in front of her. The woman’s back curved over in a perfect C shape—but at least she was on two feet. “My daughter took my last pack away and these damn nurses have no sympathy at all.” Reese looked at the woman; she liked her.

“Sure,” she said, reluctant still, but offered a cigarette out of her pack nonetheless. She’d cut down to four today. Not so bad.

“Thanks.” The woman produced a lighter from her pocket, shuffled away toward a bench at the edge of the circular entrance drive.

Maybe Benjamin’s patterns would have changed if she’d done things differently. His driving habits, usual routes. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if . . . Reese ground out her cigarette, refused to let her mind go that way. It happened. That’s all. Benjamin wasn’t alive anymore, as impossible as it seemed.

She made her way through the heat and stagnant smoke, went back inside, and tried to navigate back to the elevators hidden inside a maze of halls. Why were hospitals so complicated?

“Hold that, please,” a doctor called as she pushed the button for Angel’s floor.

She put her hand out, waited for him to get in. Good-looking guy. No ring. But her heart wasn’t in it. She couldn’t get her mind off Benjamin. Thirty-five years old, and suddenly he’s dead. How could that be true? She imagined his car, crushed and ruined, the skin of the convertible top shredded through by the timber.

“Here,” the doctor said, startling her. She turned her head to see him looking at her. He had a cup of coffee in one hand, held out a cafeteria napkin for her to take from the other. She felt the tears on her cheek and was suddenly angry with him for being there, but she took the napkin, mumbled a halfhearted thank-you.

When the door opened, she walked out without looking back.

Aside from the emotions, the overwhelming sadness of it, she had to deal with how to move forward. Gina seemed to be an obvious part of the solution, as odd as that was. Reese had let her hopes rise and fall, then rise again, looking toward another ending, one that didn’t involve Ben’s second wife. After meeting Gina, she saw that it would have never happened that way. But that hardly mattered anymore. Of all the scenarios she played out in her mind, she never envisioned that Ben would be the one missing in the picture.

“Hey, there.” The nurse smiled at her as she came off the third-floor elevator. “We’ve got a little girl who’s ready to get out of here.”

“How is she?”

“She’s good,” the nurse answered. “Her energy comes and goes with the pills, but overall, she’s bounced back like a champ. Kids are amazing.”

Angel sat cross-legged on the bed. Her curly brown hair fell around her face as she looked down at the mound of Tootsie Rolls piled in front of her.

“Where’d you get those?”

“An old lady two doors down the hall got a basket of stuff. She gave me the bag of Tootsie Rolls that was in it ’cause she said they pull her dentures out.”

“Sounds like you did her a favor.”

Angel’s arm was in a sling. Her eyes had a slightly loopy look, probably from the painkillers, but she looked awake, happy with her stash of candy. They said she’d have a scar that would get smaller and smaller with time. She would have to do exercises to get her arm strength back after keeping it in a sling for the wound to heal. Overall, they were lucky. Might as well choose the bright side. It could have been a lot worse.

“You have lunch with that lady who shot me?” Angel asked. The question alone sounded like a recipe for therapy, but Angel’s tone made it as normal as toast.

“Gina,” Reese said. “She was married to Benjamin.” Reese stopped when she heard herself use the past tense, glanced at Angel to see if she noticed. She hadn’t. “She feels really bad about hurting you. We’ve talked about this. It was an accident. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I know.” Angel sounded unconcerned.

“We scared her when we stepped on her boat. She thought we were people who might hurt her. She understands who we are now. I think you’ll like her.”

“I know, Mom. You told me all that this morning. Besides, Ben said I’d like her too.” Angel opened a piece of candy and put it in her mouth. She’d gotten pretty good at handling the wrappers with one hand. Through a mouthful of candy she muttered, “She doesn’t look like her picture.”

Reese tried to remember if she’d shown Angel any pictures. Or had it been Benjamin?

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” Reese said, all the while thinking ahead. She had to get around to the truth, the news about Ben.

“I guess so. When’s Ben coming?”

Reese ordered the words in her head, the phrasing. But nothing made saying it seem simple.

“What’s wrong?” Even Angel could tell that she was stalling.

Reese sat on the edge of the bed, picked up a piece of candy, took it out of the wrapper, but just held it. She suddenly felt she might not be able to swallow if it was in her mouth.

“Honey,” she began. “I just had a long talk with Gina. We’re going back to the boat with her this afternoon. But Benjamin’s not there.”

“Where is he? At his house?”

Reese listened to the sounds out in the hall, listened for something that would take the moment from her. But nothing did.

“Benjamin had an accident. Gina just told me about it. He’s, well . . . baby, he died. About three months ago. He’s not here anymore.”

She didn’t know what to expect from her daughter. She sat, waited, braced for tears, questions, whatever would come.

“Where did he go?”

The question sounded so fragile. It stopped Reese. Angel knew about death. It was an odd thing to ask. Maybe the pills made it hard for her to understand.

“I don’t know, Angel,” she said. “I guess he’s in heaven.”

“So God’s looking after him, then.” Angel’s voice sounded faraway.

“What?”

“That’s what happens, right?” Angel picked up a loose candy wrapper, moved it around with her fingers. “They change into spirits and God takes care of them.”

“Yeah, sweetie,” Reese managed. “He’s doing fine. God’s looking after Benjamin for us.”

Reese had never been one for church services, but from Angel’s lips, she was almost convinced that it could be true. She couldn’t imagine where her daughter would have heard about God and spirits. It went against Reese’s nature to confirm something she had no idea might be right. But it seemed important to Angel. Important that it at least be possible.

“I wish he didn’t die,” Angel said, her face beginning to show the sadness that had to come. The tremor of her lower lip caused Reese’s maternal urges to flail about.

“It’s okay to cry, Angel. Even if he’s with God, it makes me sad that he’s not here. I cried when I heard about it.”

“You’re crying again,” Angel said, her own eyes bright with tears.

“You’re right.” Reese put her arms around her daughter, careful to avoid pressing on the child’s bandaged shoulder. The living, breathing child offered proof that miracles existed along with all the pain.

None of it was playing out the way she had hoped as she and Angel had driven into town the night before. And she realized that she’d have to explain to Angel again about how she couldn’t talk about Benjamin in front of Gina. Not yet, anyway.

But those concerns could wait. For the time being, she would hold her little girl and let herself feel the sadness that was only beginning to take shape in her conscious thought. At the very least, she had the right to feel sad. Seems that she’d been letting go of Benjamin over and over again for as long as she could remember now. But that wouldn’t happen anymore. He was finally gone for good. This time, he’d been the one to do the leaving.